History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v1.c3.6

v1.c3.6

The people of India were prevented by another and more important reason from offering resistance as a whole to the Mahomedans. It is our view that one of the three or more main causes of the fall of the Indo-Aryans was the prevalence of Buddhism in this country. As Gibbon has shown that the spread of Christianity was one of the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire, an impartial historian of India cannot help declaring that the prevalence of Buddhism in India operated in a similar manner. Buddhism worked to bring about this downfall of Indian kingdoms in more than one important direction. The high esteem in which Buddhism held sanyāsa and the fact that it allowed people of all castes, men and women, old and young, to flock to the fold of recluses and pass a life of idleness and begging spread among the people a sense of carelessness about their political condition and worldly prosperity, which materially impaired their capacity to offer resistance to foreign invaders. The history of the conquest of Sind as described in these pages will afford the most lamentable illustration of this tendency of Buddhism. Mediæval Hinduism indeed tried to eradicate this morbid feeling of the people towards sanyāsa, but the sentiment was now too deep-rooted in the minds of the people and as we shall have to relate in our second volume, the greatest philosopher of India Śankara had to recognise it and inculcate it as a tenet of the new doctrine he preached, although he tried to restrict Sanyāsa to Brahmins and to males only. The Hinduism of modern days does not respect this restriction and thousands of Sadhus of all castes, young and old, male and female live in temples and Mathas which have practically replaced the Sanghārāmas of the Buddhists so vividly described by Hiuen Tsang, and pass their time, not so much in devotional prayers as in an unceasing struggle to live by begging. Such a philosophy must act prejudicially on a people's capacity to resist and it is no wonder that the Indo-Aryans fell before the Mahomedans in a manner they had never done before.